‘Loving atonal shards’ on new PLOM EP

The latest release on Danish label FLUF is another unwavering dispatch from the outskirts of electronic music, this time from PLOM, aka Barcelona-based producer Pau Magrané Figuera.

Actual bio details are sketchy enough, but PLOM’s website is a gloriously garish affair that looks like a broken link dead end from a 1997 Dreamweaver college project. The sense of nudge-wink antics carries through to the releases on his DIY cassette label Nyapster – one of his own releases is called Super Ultra Mega Rare Very Difficult Hard-to-find Record. Track 1 is a kid humming the A-Team theme for a few seconds, and track 3, Connexio is a garbled, jarring edit of Elastica’s 90s indie hit Conection with the Ableton metronome as percussion, iPhone ringtones and Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman for a split second. The other six cuts are “private tracks” with a 00:00 run-time. Kidder.

His new release on FLUF is described by the label as is “50% dreamy rhythmic barrage, 50% loving atonal shards”, but they left out a few percentage points for the banjaxed mechanical bird noises at the start of track 1, 0017A (All FLUF tracks are just given a catalogue number). The insectoid hisses and squirts offer another semi-organic lifeline, but the rhythmic barrage is where it’s at really — think AFX, but that time he put sandpaper on the decks.

You won’t find any looped bars over 0017A’s 10 minutes but there’s plenty of next-gen drilling techno to hang on to — especially the bassline in the last 3 minutes that sounds like Laurent Garnier’s Crispy Bacon through a digital smithereen mincer.

Track 2, 0017AA is another six minutes of playful abstraction, on a bed of digital crickets and sputtering helicopter sonics. You don’t get any beats this time, you wasted all your energy on track 1. Just lie back and get sucked into the engine.